Taking business back from cloud service providers

One in five of the companies responding to a Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) survey of cloud trends said they are moving some or all of their outsourced cloud systems back on-premises.

The top two reasons respondents gave for moving away from cloud service providers were the Amazon EC2 outage and the Dropbox security breach, according to CompTIA, which conducted the survey of 900 IT and business professionals and IT firms in June with research firm Research Now.

Difficulty integrating on-premise systems with systems in the cloud was another reason given for the shift back in-house, as was the realization by some of the companies that they could build their own private cloud.

“Adoption of the cloud model continues to grow, but there are different nuances,” said Todd Thibodeaux, CompTIA president and CEO. “I think some of these companies recognize that a hybrid [cloud] approach meets a variety of their needs, and some realize that they have the infrastructure in place to have a private or hybrid cloud.”

Overall, more people are using the cloud in more ways — whether with an IaaS, PaaS or SaaS provider, or through a public, private or hybrid model — and these far outnumber the people who are moving things out of the cloud, Thibodeaux said. The CompTIA study found that more than half of the respondents plan to increase their investment in cloud computing by 10% or more in the next 12 months.

If anything, the survey data shows that cloud adoption has moved to a point of maturity in which customers are surer of their needs and more confident that the public cloud model is the right vehicle to meet many of those needs. This is a far cry from a year ago when the leading question was still “What is the cloud?”

In fact, the cloud crosses the globe as a unifying strategic initiative, unlike any other technology Thibodeaux has seen in his decades in the industry, he said.

Our understanding of the cloud has matured, but we are far from nailing down best practices, the main reason being that the cloud has too many moving parts — not to mention players.